


A Thing of Wonder

by Lynzee005



Series: Moonlight Universe [5]
Category: Twin Peaks
Genre: Audrey goes to college, First snowfall, Gen, Moonlight Universe, blizzard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-14
Updated: 2016-12-14
Packaged: 2018-09-08 12:35:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8845309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lynzee005/pseuds/Lynzee005
Summary: The One Where Audrey Goes to College..and her classmates are curious about her mysterious life, mysterious stories, and mysterious boyfriend.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RedemptionByFire (steelneena)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/steelneena/gifts).



> Written from the first-person perspective of one of Audrey's classmates...for reasons that will become clear at the end. 
> 
> For RedemptionByFire (steelneena)—we did a lil fic exchange. She posted her story for me last night; tonight I post hers! Thank you for being a constant presence in the reviews, for encouraging me to finish the original Moonlight Trilogy, and for your ongoing friendship! This one's for you!

Audrey Horne, huh? Well, she always sat at the front of the lecture hall for every class she took. She was always one of the first students to arrive, and nearly always the last one to leave. She wore saddle shoes and plaid pencil skirts to class, even on days when we had exams and most of the students barely changed out of their pyjamas before stumbling to their desks. Her hair was impeccably styled in fashionably retro and delicately tousled finger waves, occasionally swept up and pinned back to the side of her head but most often left to tumble about her ears, always just skimming her jawline. When she chanced to stick her hand up in class, everyone else shut up, because Audrey Horne had the most distinctively dream-like way of asking questions and submitting thoughts to class discussions; everyone wanted to hear not just what she had to say but the way in which she said it.

The most interesting thing about Audrey was just how much of her was a mystery. She was one of only a handful of people in the relatively small and close-knit Haverford College student body who resided off-campus, which meant none of us encountered her outside of class. When we did, finally, manage to get some time with her away from the books and the lectures, well…let’s put it this way: she claimed to live in Philadelphia with her boyfriend, an FBI Agent who, she said, came to her town in precisely the Middle of Nowhere, from the sounds of things, a year earlier to solve the murder of the high school homecoming queen before getting possessed by an evil spirit that dwelt in the woods outside town and then disappearing into a shadow realm within a circle of twelve sycamore trees, which is where Audrey found him when she decided to stage a rescue attempt.

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. None of us believed a word of it either.

Maybe that’s why we had such a hard time believing that this person—this Special Agent Cooper—actually existed. To hear Audrey describe him, he sounded like a dreamboat, a 1940s matinee idol ghosted from the silver screen but not actually of this world. We all thought she’d made him up, a perfect boyfriend to match her eclectic sense of self.

Until the day we met him for the first time.

⌃ ♢ ⌃

I had four classes with Audrey. The first in the week was Sociology class, which ran Monday-Wednesday-Friday at the ungodly hour of 9am. We became friends in this class, purely based on our mutual love of coffee, which Audrey—coming in from off-campus—brought from a cafe in the city that I loved. I made an offhand comment about it one day and after that, without fail, she began bringing me a coffee for every class.

I never said she wasn’t nice. I’ve just implied that she was a bit eccentric, that’s all.

Our second and third classes together were back-to-back Tuesday-Thursday classes—20th Century Queer Literature from 11 until 12:30, and then Abnormal Psychology from 12:30 until 2:00. We had a pact that if either one of us missed a class, we’d borrow each other’s notes, especially for Queer Lit; our professor was well-known for putting obscure information from her lectures into the final exam questions, so it was vital that we stayed on top of things.

Our final class together was Early American History, which took place on Wednesday nights from 6:00 until 9:00. And it was during this class period, just before midterms on the night of the first serious snowfall for the Philadelphia area, that I finally got our chance to figure out just who this enigmatic woman really was.

Class had been cancelled for some reason or another, and as the rest of the students trickled out of the lecture hall and across campus to their dorm rooms, Audrey seemed—for the first time—to be at a loss.

“Look alive, Audrey,” I told her. “Cancelled class is usually a good thing.”

She shrugged as she folded her spiral notebook closed and replaced it in her leather book bag. “I don’t have my car with me today,” she muttered. “Dale was going to pick me up at nine once class ended. He doesn't have a car phone or anything, so I—”

Now I’m not the nicest person on the planet but I’m not heartless. I lived in dorms five minutes from the lecture hall. I knew my roommate—who was in Queer Lit with us—wasn’t going to have an issue if Audrey came back to hang out with us while she waited for her ride.  _This is perfect_ , I thought.  _Maybe we’ll finally meet this mysterious boyfriend of hers…_

My offer was accepted, and Audrey’s demeanour lightened as she packed the rest of her things into her bag and we walked out of the lecture theatre. Bundling up against the cold—me with my hiking jacket, Audrey in an anorak that I swear must have cost an absolute fortune—we started off across the quad. The snow had stopped falling and the sky above us had cleared, revealing a few glimmers of bright stars. It was silent as the grave, the kind of hushed snowfall silence that only happens on winter nights.

“I don’t think I've ever seen this much snow before,” she said as we walked, her eyes bright. “At least not before I moved here.”

My curiosity was piqued; I walked through the door she’d opened. “Where are you from?”

She  _hmm’d_ and chewed on her lower lip for a moment before answering me with another question. “Do you know where Spokane is?”

I didn’t really but I took a stab at it. “Washington, right? On the border with Idaho?”

She nodded. “Well, I’m from a town about 90 miles from there. North. Near the Canadian border,” she paused. “It’s a really small town, nothing like this. It’s called Twin Peaks because the town is right there between two mountains,” she chuckled. “Inventive, huh?”

“Sounds lovely,” I said, and I meant it. I’d grown up, gone to school, and lived my whole life in the same ten mile radius in which I currently stood. “What made you come all the way to Philly for college?”

Audrey readjusted the shoulder strap on her bag and shoved her gloved hands into her pockets. “Well, Dale is based here for work. He's at the Philadelphia Field Office." The way she spoke about it made it seem so natural, as though everyone in the world had a significant other who worked for the FBI and this was the story about hers. She had that way about her, a way of making the most fantastical things seem normal, and the most normal things seem like dreams. I don't know how she did it.

She continued, but her tone had shifted. She seemed guarded, hesitant. "What happened to us there…it was strange. We needed to put some distance between us and that place. Philadelphia seemed—"

At that moment, in the branches of the trees we were passing beneath, a breeze caused the bare branches to stir and rub against each other. Audrey's eyes darted up to the canopy above our heads. There was fear there, but it was more than just the result of being startled by a noise; this went deeper.

It was like she didn't trust the trees at all.

I was curious, and she'd started it, so I just sort of went there. “What happened in Twin Peaks?” I asked.

We were nearing the door to my dorm; I worried that our conversation would end before it had even gotten started. But Audrey confounded my expectations.

“Well,” she said as I tugged open the door to the lobby. “It all started when my friend Laura was found murdered…”

By the time we’d reached the door to my room, she had gotten to the part where Agent Cooper—that’s her boyfriend—arrived in town to investigate. But the story was halted the moment we opened the door, as my roommate was having a crisis—something about our assigned paper on Djuna Barnes’  _Nightwood_ for Queer Lit class. Audrey’s face, shrouded in trepidation just moments before, positively lit up.

“Don’t you love that book?” she asked.

“No,” my roommate seethed. “I don’t understand it. I loathe it.”

Audrey’s smile was bright. “Maybe you  _loathe_ it because you don’t  _understand_ it,” she said, shrugging off her anorak. “I didn’t get it either, but then I talked to my friend Denise and she explained its significance, and it was like a lightbulb went off over my head!”

“Is Denise a lesbian?” my roommate asked. “Because if she’s not, I doubt she has any insight…”

“Well, no,” Audrey began as she teetered there on the threshold to our room. My roommate was about to counter with something when Audrey continued, cutting her off mid-breath. “Denise is transgender, actually. It’s not quite the same…or maybe it is…I’m not really all that sure. See, we don’t really get into this stuff. Denise is my friend, but she’s  _really_ Dale’s friend. They go way back. She’s a DEA Agent. I think they worked a case together, but I can’t remember the details. Anyway, she and I are really close, and when she comes to Philadelphia she knows all the best places to eat—Dale does, too, but Denise is on another level…”

“Wait,” my roommate said, casting suspicious eyes back and forth between me and Audrey for a moment. “You have a friend who is transgender?”

Audrey nodded and smiled, and all I could do was stare. It was a surprisingly cosmopolitan thing for a small-town girl to know about. The mystery was deepening with every passing second. Just who  _was_ this girl?

“How did you meet her?” I asked.

By this point it would have been impossible to stop Audrey from talking as she barrelled along, 1000 miles-a-minute, telling us about how she met Denise the day she brought Dale some photographs of a drug transaction that would surely absolve Dale of any wrongdoing in a cross-border cocaine trafficking operation that he’d been framed for in retaliation for his part in rescuing her, Audrey, from the clutches of the  _real_ cocaine operatives, who had a hand in running a brothel in British Columbia where Audrey had gone to work undercover to try and figure out what her friend Laura was doing working there before she died.

Don’t look at me like that. It’s not _my_ story.

By the end, my roommate had forgotten entirely about the issues with her essay, and the three of us had spread out, reassembling ourselves in various permutations around the small dorm room. Audrey sat on my bed, back against the wall, her legs tucked demurely to the side. She had her book bag in her lap, and all of her textbooks were jumbled around her, as she tried to bring the conversation back to  _Nightwood_ .

“It’s just a stunningly original piece of fiction,” she finished. “And that’s not just me saying it. Dylan Thomas thought it was one of the best books of this century.”

My roommate gaped. “Maybe you ought to write my essay for me.”

Audrey shrugged. “For a hundred bucks, maybe I will.”

I laughed out loud, and soon all three of us were laughing, and after a moment, I don't think any of us really knew why anymore.

“You know?” Audrey mused finally, in that way she had of sighing as she spoke. It made my skin tingle. “I haven’t laughed like this with anyone aside from Dale in a very long time.” She rolled the lower hem of her sweater in her fingers. “Back home, I didn’t have a lot of friends.”

“Back home?” my roommate asked.

“Twin Peaks,” I said. “Washington State.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Most people haven’t,” Audrey grinned. “Which is okay for most of the people in town. It’s a very small place. Insular. We talked about it a bit in our sociology class the other day." She paused then and dug out her textbook, flipping through it for a moment while we watched, utterly spellbound. 

I can't explain it. Really I can't. She was—is, I suppose—utterly unlike any person I've ever met. 

When she found the page she was looking for she smiled, her finger tracing along the page as she read. " _Gemeinschaft_ and  _Gesellschaft_ . Remember?” she said, her eyes lighting up as she scanned our faces for recognition before returning her attention to the book for a moment, reading silently, her eyes scanning back and forth until she finished. Setting the book down in front of her, she leaned back against the wall and lifted her eyes to the ceiling. “Twin Peaks is the kind of place where you’re born to be something and that’s all you can be, and you should never dare to dream of anything else for yourself. There’s this lady…she used to frighten me as a child, because she was a little bit odd. She carries a log everywhere she goes. But she helped me a lot when things went really bad last year and I think I understand her now, why she lives up on the mountain instead of down in town. She’s not the same as everyone else. She’s different. But we’re all different, really. That's the thing. It’s just that no one acknowledges those differences unless they’re really _really_ different, I think, and then they don’t want anything to do with you. That’s how people were able to ignore Laura for so long. She was different but not enough for people to really notice. Or care.”

My roommate shot me a glance, and I cleared my throat. “Laura was your friend, right?” I clarified. “The one who was murdered?”

Audrey nodded. “Mmm-hmm,” she said. “It was horrible, what happened. Small towns don't have murders very often." She sighed. "That’s how I met Dale. He came to town to investigate her murder. And then a lot of crazy things started to happen...”

I side-eyed my roommate, who couldn’t believe that all our speculation about this mysterious boyfriend might all come to an end. We’d finally have our answers. It was like Christmas morning.

“Like what?” I asked, barely able to contain my glee. I hoped I didn't sound deranged.

Audrey furrowed her brow; if she noticed my odd reaction, she didn't seem all that bothered by it. “Well, there was the whole thing I told you about Denise and the drugs. That was pretty bad. It was my fault entirely for sneaking off like that, but I managed to save his job in the end with those photos, so I guess it evened out. We were friends then. Nothing more. Well…I mean…there  _was_ more, but it wasn’t like we were…I don’t know…” she was blushing, ferociously.

“You and the FBI Agent?” my roommate asked, before making a crude hand gesture that made Audrey blush from the apples of her cheeks all the way down her neck. I clucked my tongue.

Audrey was embarrassed, but she was a sport. “It wasn't a big deal. We went our separate ways. It wasn’t going to work. I was too young, he said, and he had gotten involved with another person in one of his cases a few years before and she ended up dying, so he wasn’t about to make the same mistake again. Except, unfortunately, he did…”

“What?” I asked.

So Audrey told us about how he struck up a friendship with a young woman named Annie, and how Annie had been targeted by Agent Cooper’s former FBI partner as a way of extracting revenge on Cooper for his role in the death of the woman he’d been involved with, who happened to be his partner’s wife. It was sordid and delicious, just like a soap opera. She told us how the young woman was kidnapped and taken to this shadow realm by his ex-partner, and Cooper went in after her, but when he came out he was different. 

Audrey paused then and rifled through her textbooks. “It was like that guy in the case study from Abnormal Psych class. The one with multiple personalities. That’s what happened to him when he came out of there. Of course, none of us really knew what was happening. I was in the hospital myself, actually, since I’d chosen a really bad day to stage a non-violent protest at the Savings and Loan and ended up being nearly blown to bits when an explosion took off most of the side of the building.”

This town sounded too incredible. I could scarcely believe my ears.

Audrey continued to talk, about how she noticed slight shifts in his personality, and how he seemed to change before her eyes…and then she got really quiet and didn’t say anything for a long, long moment.

“I don’t want you to think poorly of him,” she said finally.

Think poorly of him? I wanted to meet this incredible person more than ever. Surely, if he actually existed and wasn’t a figment of this mysterious girl’s imagination, he was the most interesting person on the planet. I  _had_ to know more.

So we encouraged her to continue, but we could tell she was censoring herself now. The pauses. The sighs. The way she chewed her bottom lip. What she did tell us was still fascinating, though, though I'm not sure what was the truth and what were the half-truths—that she began having dreams about him, dreams that frightened her because they seemed to be messages from some other plane of existence. And when she finally figured out what had happened, that he was trapped in this place, she made the singular decision to go in after him, to this shadow realm, to rescue him. She talked about the way it looked in this place, these red curtains, the patterned black and white floor, the strange characters she'd met there. And she talked about how the psychological damage of the whole experience had been hard to undo. She told us about the fear that had gripped her and how she’d pushed it aside in order to do what she had to do but how it crept back into her life in nightmares. She told us about the panic attacks—the ones they both suffered from, for different reasons—and how long it took her to feel comfortable around him again. She told us about their decision to move as far away from Twin Peaks as possible in order to heal, together.

And when she was done, we realized it was nearly 8:45, and I wondered how it was possible that two and a half hours had elapsed feeling only like fifteen minutes.

“Your ride will be here soon,” I told her, regretting it almost instantly. I didn't want the stories to end.

“Right,” she said, as she began gathering her books into her bag. “I’m so sorry for wasting all this time telling you all about my life. Next time I promise I won’t do any talking.”

But neither my roommate nor I minded at all. I would have happily sat there all night listening to her, and I figured that, over the course of our conversation, I’d fallen a little bit in love with Audrey Horne myself.

It had all been a precursor to this moment, though, and I’d nearly forgotten what the point was. As she stood up and put her anorak back on, I stumbled to my feet.

“Uhhh…Audrey, really, we should walk you back to the parking lot. It’s dark out, and…”

“Oh!” she exclaimed, her mouth forming a perfect ‘O’ as she smiled, slipping her gloves onto her hands “That’s such a nice offer. You can meet Dale too!”

My roommate and I exchanged glances, but we weren’t as covert about it as before, I guess, because Audrey saw. She seemed crestfallen.

“Oh no,” she said, lowering her eyes. “I’m sorry I told you all of that. Really…he’s such a wonderful person. I never should have said anything…”

I shook my head while my roommate laughed. “No, Audrey, it’s not that. Honestly…” I paused, wondering if I should tip my hand and admit that all along we had been placing wagers on whether or not this guy even existed, or if he was simply a figment of her wild yet aesthetically-consistent imagination.

In the end, it was my roommate who said it. “We honestly didn’t think he existed.”

Audrey’s eyebrow quirked up; I had never seen such a look of amusement on someone’s face.

“What?” she said, laughing around her words. “Of course he exists! You thought I made him up?”

We both shrugged, suddenly feeling incredibly silly. “He sounded too good to be true,” I admitted.

Audrey wiped tears from her eyes as she pulled on her anorak. She sighed. “You know what? That’s just the thing: _he is_. He really is.”

Soon, the three of us were trudging back towards the main buildings. My breath was quick and my hands shook. I didn't know why I was nervous all of a sudden; I had no reason to be, other than the slight suggestion that there was more to the story that Audrey had withheld from us for some reason. Had this Agent Cooper character gone 'round the bend completely? Had he suffered a total psychotic break? Had Audrey?

I was, for the first time, a little bit afraid myself. I tugged the hood of my jacket around my head and held it there, just to give me something to do with my hands.

Sure enough, as we rounded the corner and came within sight of the parking lot, under a cone of light from the overhead streetlamp, we saw a black sedan. Audrey waved, and the figure inside waved back.

“One minute,” she said as she picked up her pace towards the car, leaving us several steps behind.

“Is that him?” my roommate asked.

I shrugged. “Could be anyone.”

"Are you scared?" 

Again, I shrugged. "A little. You?"

“A little. Should we have told her we didn’t believe her?”

“She didn’t seem too hard done by.”

A pause. “I mean, he really did sound fake.”

“The whole  _thing_ sounds fake.”

“But…what if it isn’t?”

I mulled it over—spiritual possession, mystical owls, portals to other dimensions. I shook my head. “Then I guess I’m gonna have some deep existential questions to find answers for…”

The sound of the car door closing brought our attention back to the moment. Audrey was walking back towards us; the man in the car joined her. They crunched along the path, the sound of their footfalls growing louder as they approached. Audrey was smiling.

“Dale Cooper, I’d like you to meet my friends.”

She introduced us and we shook his hand. He was every bit as handsome as she described—jet black hair as carefully-styled as hers was, a strong jaw, clear greenish eyes and a wide smile that reached up to touch the corners.

“Pleasure to meet you,” he said.

“You look like Cary Grant…” my roommate said in a voice that wisped out like ice fog, floating up to the clear skies above.

I was mortified. But Dale laughed. “You really think so?”

“And you’re an FBI Agent?”

He nodded. “That’s right.”

“Do you have you gun on you?”

Having enough of that, I jabbed my roommate in the side with my elbow and cleared my throat. “It’s too bad class was cancelled.” I didn’t mean it; I hated history class. But anything was better than the embarrassment of the conversation as it was.

Audrey grinned. “But I’m glad you offered me a place to crash,” she said. “Otherwise I’d be hanging out in the lecture hall and I’d actually have to do my assignments…”

Dale looked around at the campus, bathed in moonlight and the glow of street lamps and reflected snowshine. “You never think about your alma mater looking quite the same once you leave it, but this place hasn’t changed one bit.”

“You’re a Haverford man?” I asked.

Dale nodded. “Class of…well, a few years ago,” he grinned. “Clearly not long enough for me to forget what it was like.”

Audrey huddled up in her coat and Dale wrapped his arm around her shoulders.

“We should get going,” he said, shaking our hands again. “It’s not often that I get to meet Audrey’s friends. Perhaps we should do this again sometime.”

I smiled and nodded at him. “It was great to meet you.”

“Yeah. Great,” my roommate gushed.

Audrey smiled up at him and then back at us. “See you tomorrow?”

I nodded. “You bet.”

They walked back off to their car, arms wrapped around each other, and we watched them drive off into the night.

“God damn,” my roommate said. “I think I’m in love.”

I rolled my eyes but had to admit that I felt the same. “Oh, come on," I chided.

“Did you see his cheekbones?”

“You’re the absolute worst…”

Suffice it to say, Dale Cooper was a major topic of conversation for the two of us for not only the rest of the night but for the bulk of the next week, too. Even me, cynical as I am, couldn’t help but see that the two of them made a striking pair. It made sense. She was beautiful; he was handsome. They were a TV couple, someone you see paired up on a soap opera but never in real life. And yet there they were…

⌃ ♢ ⌃

So that’s all I know, really. We met up two more times, once by accident when I was Christmas shopping downtown one day and then again when we went out for dinner, the three of us. It was nice. They’re a _nice_ couple. I don’t know what more I can say about it.

I’m sorry…what did you say your name was? Right, right...sorry, I just have this thing about names. 

And...sorry, one more question: Who exactly did you say you worked for again, Mr. Earle?

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from this quote by Susan Orlean: "A snow day literally and figuratively falls from the sky—unbidden—and seems like a thing of wonder." 
> 
> The snow is a thing of wonder. So, I think, is Audrey.


End file.
